The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria

Hyman, Stanley Edgar

doi:10.2307/538322

The Journal of American Folklore

1957

DOI: 10.2307/538322

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The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria

Stanley Edgar Hyman¹

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“…Though thi;s reduction has been interpreted äs an unconscious, inevitable devolutionany process, 31 there is no need to place any automatic value on it. Other devices of interperformance which storytellers employ are forms of Variation too well known to folk narrative scholars to require more tham Brief mention.…”

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confidence: 99%

Interperformance

Haring¹

1988

Fabula

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InterperformanceEvery folktale text is a mosaic of quotations-recurrent phrases, characters, and incidents. Formulaic openings and closings are cited verbatim; trickster repeats the behavior he exhibited last time; the youngest son is again successful. The Motif-Index ofFolk Literature is a dictionary of familiär quotations. Regarded äs performance, every storytelling event 1 is constituted by a mosaic of complex relationships to other events. 2 Belonging to a Community of craftspersons and artists, äs well äs to a Community of performer and audience, Storytellers fill their tales with "directional Signals" 3 to the discourse of their craft. For literature, the directional signals-these homages, imitations, or parodies of the work of fellow artists-have been analyzed with great thoroughness and subtlety by Gerard Genette. 4 Similar signals may also be found in folklore, where they function to produce superior performances. I call such performances superior because they are more complex, engaging, and multileveled than those which have been fashioned directly to purpose. To name the relation between homages, imitations, or parodies and their models, I coin the word Interperformance, meaning that relation of inclusion which connects storytelling events to the various types of discourse which engender them.This neologism transposes a category from literary criticism on to folklore. Intertextuality is Julia Kristeva's term for the relation between literary texts explicated at length by M. M. Bakhtin. All discourse, according to Bakhtin, and most emphatically the discourse of art, Orients itself to other discourse; everyday talk, law, religion, the human sciences, rhetorical genres all take part in the continuing conversation of mankind. 5 As intertextuality is to literary texts, so interperformance is to folklore performance: the relation of a performance of a tale, proverb, riddle to other performances. The other model for the notion of interperformance, also drawn from Bakhtin, is intergeneric dialogue, the ways in which "genres engage one another in varying degrees of Integration and exchange." 6 Interperformance exists against the background of the dialectic of tradition and Situation. There, Storytellers make use of five important directional signals: allusion, quotation, framing, metafolklore, and Variation.

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confidence: 99%

Interperformance

Haring¹

1988

Fabula

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Moses Platt and the Regeneration of "Barbara Allen"

Doyle¹,

Kelley²

1991

Western Folklore

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A Theory for American Folklore

Dorson¹

1959

The Journal of American Folklore

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The Child Ballad in America: Some Aesthetic Criteria

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Interperformance

Interperformance

Moses Platt and the Regeneration of "Barbara Allen"

A Theory for American Folklore

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